This relates to communications systems and, particularly, to the assignment of nonces.
A communications system typically communicates sensitive information that is confidential and should be protected while in communication or at the endpoints. A wireless communications system may be particularly vulnerable since an unauthorized party may simply monitor a wireless communication medium, such as portions of the radio-frequency (RF) spectrum, to gather such sensitive information. As a result, wireless communications systems typically implement various security techniques to protect sensitive information from unauthorized access, particularly while in transit.
A communications security system may use a key for security. A key is a numeric code combined with text to encrypt the text for security purposes. Each time a message is encrypted using the key, a new value for a nonce is used to initialize the encryption. A “nonce” is a number value in a security system that is only used once during the lifetime of a key.